


We'll Always Have Paris

by DinosaurTheology



Series: Temptation I Can't Resist [2]
Category: NCIS
Genre: Bittersweet, Cute, F/M, Hotels, Paris (City), Short & Sweet, Sweet, Tooth-Rotting Fluff, Vignette
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-12-02
Updated: 2015-12-02
Packaged: 2018-05-04 11:53:28
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,658
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5333150
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/DinosaurTheology/pseuds/DinosaurTheology
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>When neither Tel Aviv nor Washington satisfies, two old friends meet in a Paris hotel. One wants a serious conversation, the other can't get two words out without quoting an old movie.</p>
            </blockquote>





	We'll Always Have Paris

**Author's Note:**

> Still don't own NCIS, but gosh I've loved it for ages. This pairing really appealed to me... kind of still miss Ziva.

“I do not know why coming to this city again was so important to you. We could have met in Washington, Tel Aviv, Outer Mongolia.” Her back was turned, but he could somehow see her lips purse. “The hotel would have been much less expensive.”

“Because the line is ‘we’ll always have Paris,’ Ziva, not ‘we’ll always have Washington, Tel Aviv or Outer Mongolia.” He thought about it a second. “Outer Mongolia could be cool. Interesting. But that’s just not the way things are. Sort of like the line is ‘play it, Sam,’ not ‘play it again, Sam.’”

She did swivel her head towards him this time, brow creased above melted chocolate eyes with unrelenting, inescapable depths. “Who is Sam? What is he playing?”

“Oh, seriously.” Tony laughs and claps his hands behind his head. “I am not rising to the bait. You have known me for ten years, Miss David. You don’t get to tell me you don’t know who Sam, Rick and Ilsa are.”

She put on the face he called “thoughtful Ziva,” which could shift at any instant into “snarky” or “snappish” Ziva, depending on how the wind blew. They were all pretty severely cute. “I know that you recently, briefly had a cat named Rick Blaine. He could not stand your company and fled. It was very tragic.”

He turned and buried his face in the, she was right, all too expensive silk pillowcase. “You’re killing me! I spend a decade of my life, my prime years of manhood, trying to teach you about the beauty of American film and six months back in the desert strip away all my hard work.”

“I cannot hear you with your mouth full of pillow feathers.” She contradicted herself, an instant later. “And Tel Aviv is not a desert. It is a beautiful city, much prettier than Washington, Philadelphia or Baltimore.” She wrinkled her nose. “I had forgotten how much nicer cinnamon and cardamom in a market smelled instead of diesel and cheesesteak.”

“None of them have anything on this place.” He looked away from the pillow to regard a slender, olive toned tongue of flame in soft wool sleep pants and a baby-blue Cooke Monster pajama top, one bare, delicate foot propped up on the bed revealing five toes cleaner and cuter than he thought that he, a man without a foot fetish, could ever be capable of appreciating. “And not a one of them has anything on a you, schweetheart.”

“Are you having a stroke?”

“What?”

“Your voice went all funny for a moment. I was worried that it might be nonological.”

“You’ve lost me.”

“You know…” she tapped her palm against the bedspread. “Having to do with your nerves. Or brain, probably, in your case.”

“Oh. Neurological.” He laughed. “It’s funny how much I miss having to deal with a partner that’s got aphasia. The new one just sits on desks and climbs walls.”

“Is she a gargoyle?”

“Nah, just… her own little brand of NSA crazy. We’re keeping her, though. We like her. Sort of like a… weird pet.”

“You changed the subject. You still haven’t told me what happened to your voice.”

“I was doing my Bogey, Ziva. You should feel honored. I don’t pull out my Bogey for everybody.”

“I am certain this is why you are not yet in prison, Tony.” She giggled. “It’s okay. I’m glad that you save your Bogey for me, even if I don’t know what it is.”

He ran his hands through his hair. “You. Are. Killing. Me.”

She nodded, smiled, and leaned over, face now inches from his. He felt her breath whisper against his cheeks and lips. It smelled sort of like that cinnamon and cardamom she was talking about earlier, maybe just a little hint of sandalwood underneath. “I could, you know. There are many excellent improvised weapons in this room.”

“You know you’re not going to, no matter how much I aggravate you.” He drew her close to his side. She nestled under his arm, let her head rest against his shoulder. The nest of shimmering, nearly black curls obscured her face but did nothing to hide its almost ethereal beauty. 

“And just how,” she said into his chest, “are you so certain of that, Very Special Agent Anthony DiNozzo?”

“Because if you killed me you’d have to cuddle with a corpse, and you’re not into that. Jimmy, sure. But not you.”

“You know, he has worked with you for over ten years, now. When are you going to stop picking on poor Jimmy so much?”

“As soon as I stop making fun of McGiggles?”

“Never, then.” She traced a finger around the outline of his jaw. “I think that teasing is the way you show affection, since you are pretty emotionally stunted otherwise.” She smiled; it lit the whole more than morning could ever hope. “Thus McGee is ‘Elf Lord,’ your new partner is a weird pet who climbs, you make fun of my little accidentalies and Jimmy is…” she wrinkled her nose, “a necrophiliac gremlin, I suppose.”

“That wife of his though… whoa…” Tony mimed whisking the air around his face. “She is definitely not losing any body heat… unless you can be zombie hot, that is.”

“There you go doing it again,” she said. “Whenever someone comes close to something that is important to the core of you it gets derailed into something silly… or gross. Or both.” She considered it a moment and then nodded. “Yes, usually both.”

“That is so totally the opposite of what is true. I mean…” He waved his hands around, “You are such a crazy lady, talking crazy talk, that you if the truth was on the North Pole then you’d be a little penguin, swimming around.” He mimed it.

She couldn’t help but giggle. “Penguins live at the South Pole, Very Special Agent.”

“That was the point, Ziva.” 

“That was also my point. Or, if you will let me explain,” she put a finger to his lips, when he started to protest and shifted her weight, holding him fast against the mattress with long, lithe muscles that bore hidden strength, “when we first met you were avoiding grief by fantasizing about your recently deceased friend and co-worker dressed as a naughty Catholic school girl.” She paused and considered, before continuing. “I mean that she was dressed as a naughty Catholic schoolgirl in your fantasy, not that you were fantasizing about her while dressed as one. I do not wish to be unclear. When I caught you at it, you pretended that you were having phone sex. In the middle of the afternoon, in a crowded office. While you were engaged in a manhunt for that very co-worker’s murderer.” She shook her head. “If that is not classic avoidant behavior—and that is correct, I asked Ducky about it once—then I am surely a goat.”

Tony wasn’t quite sure how he felt about the fact that his mental health had become such fodder water cooler discussion among his companions. “So, uh, what are we doing tonight?”

“Well,” she said, “we could keep talking about this, which is uncomfortable and not a lot of fun for either of us, even if it might be important. Or we could lie here and catch up, and then go eat a very expensive dinner which you will let me pay for since you bought the tickets for the trip, and then we will come back here and I will kiss you very soundly and you will enjoy it very much.”

“I kind of like that idea.” He enfolded her in his arms again, enjoying how their hearts were falling into a singular rhythm, one like they had seemed to beat in for years. “I’m a simple guy, Ziva, simple things make me happy.”

Her lips curled in a wicked little smirk. “Considering how happy you make me, Tony, then I must be a very simple girl indeed.”

“I don’t know if that was an insult wrapped in a compliment, the other way around or just a result of the fact that English is, like, your thirtieth language.”

“Hey, hey,” she slapped playfully at his chest. It still stung. “It is not my thirtieth language, it is my twenty-seventh language at the most.”

“What’s gonna be your thirtieth?”

She paused to mime considering it carefully. “I think that I will take up Klingon. McGee is always going on about how he and Abby can use it to communicate in secret. I would love to know what those two talk about.”

“Bats, skulls, coffins, rocket-belts and Elf Lords, I’ll bet.”

“I do not doubt.” She sighed. “What are we going to be, Tony? After this vacation, I mean… when you go back to Baltimore and I return to Tel Aviv.”

“I don’t know, Ziva, I really don’t.” He pressed a kiss through the top of her dark, massed curls. “I know what I want, but…”

“I do sometimes, but sometimes, Tony…” she exhaled, sharply. “Sometimes I just do not, or even who I am, anymore.”

“You’re Ziva David, my bona fide badass ninja assassin, and I wouldn’t have you any other way. Just as long as you’re not just a green dot on Facebook, anymore… that silent, awful, staring green dot.”

She offered him a weak smile. “I am going to have to stop leaving my chat open while I go and microwave popcorn, I think.”

He chuckled. She felt in his throat, deep in his chest. “Well, you’ll always have a snack, at least… and we’ll always have Paris.”

“You are right… no one can take that from us.”

“I could probably steal your popcorn away.”

“Only if you no longer valued your life, limbs or genitals.”

“Well in that case, I’ll just have to taste it secondhand.” He let his mouth cover hers for a long, slow, sweltering moment. They didn’t talk for a while.


End file.
